Smoke and Mirrors

You won’t find Smoke and Mirrors in your Fringe brochure. The Ricochet Project’s debut is a last-minute stand-in for the cancelled Circus Casus show, Jerk. Don’t, for a second, feel short-changed. This is contemporary circus at its most richly expressive: a metaphor for the effects of an exploitative economy on our lives and our loves.

It starts with two suits on a trapeze built for one – a sharp image of a dog-eat-dog workplace. As stock prices whir over the speaker system, Cohdi Harrell and Laura Stokes tussle for top position. He treads her down, she hangs below, then, in a flash, they flip and flip again. One looms over the other: victor and vanquished.

Loosely speaking, Harrell and Stokes play a couple lashing out at each other over a long night of the soul. They strip out of their suits, down to white pants, and work through wince-inducing routines. She ties herself in knots on the corde lisse. He hangs off the trapeze, dejected and distant. These are brilliant, balanced routines: every arched stretch offset with a click or a snap.

It’s simple, heart-on-sleeve circus, often without apparatus. The gymnastics are agonising: Stokes tiptoes on the tops of her feet and stretches a leg back until it nearly snaps. They coil round one another like boa constrictors and their bodies seem brittle and soft: all ribcages, ankles and soles. Harrell’s arrow tattoos point to his Achilles’ heels, as eloquent as anything else. Just occasionally, you glimpse human swastikas – a nod to the quiet fascism of neoliberalism.

Ultimately, the show preaches kindness—a tad pat, perhaps—borrowing that great speech from The Great Dictator: “We think too much and feel too little.” It plays over the tenderest of rope routines—spooning, hugging, cradling—before the lovers redress and restart, ready for another working day.